Visual IVRs and the Smartphone

One of the newer trends in the last year+ that I have been keeping my eye on quite a bit for customer service technology has been the movement towards so called "Visual IVRs".  The concept is pretty simple, take the idea of an IVR, or a phone tree as some would call it, and craft it into a visual mechanism either on a mobile device or on a website.  The idea is that companies would still get the caller to where they really need to go the first time and customer would not have to endure the endless prompts and frustrations of speech recognition on their way to an agent.  Theoretically, everyone wins.

There have been a few companies in this space that have been pioneers or leaders in bringing this concept to market and have done a nice job in doing so.  First, Fonolo has been one of the companies that is on the leading edge of this trend.  They first started out as a company that focused primarily on Virtual Holding type of technology where I can grab a place in line in the queue but hang up and wait for a call back when an agent frees up.  But soon thereafter, they started rethinking that model a bit and added some visual prompts to their solution so that customers could actually do all the work that is traditionally done in a voice IVR, from a visual interface on their mobile phone or on a website.

Another player in this space today is Jacada.  About a year or so ago, they took one of their existing products called the Jacada Interaction Manager and began to rethink how it could be applied to customer facing activities on mobile devices.  They have done a nice job in taking things a step further by working to make the experience on the mobile phone or website more self service help based before then moving to the Visual IVR experience.  Think troubleshooting on a mobile device that then takes you immediately to the right place in a phone queue if you are unable to solve your problem with the help of the troubleshooting tool.  Pretty slick concept and they are having good success in the market place.

I am a big fan of this trend towards more visual experiences.  They are just flat out faster for customers, more useful for customers and when done right, they are actually more likely to deflect the transfer to the voice queue than traditional self service approaches, especially on mobile devices.

With the limited success so far of these smaller brands and companies in this space, there has been the obvious rush to the market by all of the other players in the call center market/customer service technology market.  So, soon, this technology too will be another feature that exists in everyone's bag of tricks.  Which is somewhat sad to me, as that is when innovation tends to stop and the big companies move on to the next big thing.

Take a look at the smaller guys in this space though, as they are doing some really innovative things that, in my mind, will dramatically improve your customer's experience with your brand.  Especially on mobile devices, as this is still a place that brands have not thought enough about.

Machine to Machine Service: Lets Dig in a bit

Something that I have been digging into for a while that I think is really fascinating is the whole world of machine to machine interactions.  It seems like every company is looking at their business, their products or their services and striving to find a way to connect them to the rest of the world.
You have Cisco who is pushing the Internet of Everything, Salesforce that is talking about the Internet of Customers and hundreds of other companies from Tesla to Samsung to Nest that are connecting products to each other.

So, there are number of great reasons why this makes sense to do over the coming years.  Some companies talk about the data they can collect in real time.  Some talk about over the air software updates etc... But I believe the single most important application for this machine to machine technology is in predictively finding opportunities for driving to a better customer experience.  Products and services are becoming more commoditized even faster than ever and as most of the rest of the world is finally waking up to, customer experience is becoming king.  Whether that be marketing the right service or product to me at the right time, or selling me the right thing or servicing me before I even know I need it, all of these are great simplistic examples of using machines to connect us more effectively to our customers.

Tesla is probably the best example of this right now in the market.  I am unsure if they are going to be able to really scale the model, but their current service model is game changing.  If you don't already know, Tesla is a new car manufactruer that products all electric cars that are sleek, fast and obviously environmentally friendly.  But what most people don't know, is that they are hyper connected cars.  Every little detail is being captured in the central "brain" of the car and being transmitted back to Tesla HQ for analysis.  Even to the point of knowing when the front hood of the car was opened.

But what is seperating them from the pack right now more than the big things just mentioned, is their service model.  They can tell, based on the data they are collecting, that you are about to have an issue with your car.  They then throw a red flag to a piece of software that captures the issue, sends the issue automatically to a CRM system, creates a service order, they then call the customer to let them know the issue and schedule a time when they will come to the customers house to fix the problem.  Yes, come to YOUR house, not the other way around.

Obviously, there are some really great parts of this model, but the best part for me as a car owner is the idea that they are watching and paying attention to what may happen, so that I don't have a bigger issue down the line.  Sure, they could abuse this model and try to fix every little thing and nickel and dime you to death with little charges for fixing things.  But this is not their model.  And I would love to have a company doing this for me today in a number of areas in my life.  What if your mobile phone provider actually called you when they noticed that the battery life was getting low on your phone.  And maybe even offered you a new battery for a discount.

This is the creativity and innovative type of thinking that can happen when machines start talking to machines.  But lets be clear, it is not the machines talking to machines that are the key.  It is the monitoring of the data and the automated processes in the background that kick off actions that are the key to what the customer experiences.

What is an example of a machine to machine story that changed your experience with a company?